COMMENT For three weeks now, appalled observers of the train wreck of the Bersih disaster may have assumed that at some point someone within the Najib Razak administration would have the presence of mind to pull one damsel, at least, off the track of the onrushing train.

That happened yesterday when the PSM 6, or the EO 6, were released by police after nearly a month's detention on grounds that shifted from the farcical (rebellion against the king) to the incredible (threats to national security) to the manifestly false (they were central planners of the Bersih 2.0 march).

By arresting the PSM 6 for no good reason and then continuing to hold them on successively unsustainable grounds, the government had gratuitously deepened the mess of its handling of the Bersih-organised march for electoral reform on July 9.

While it lasted, the detention of the six was an abscess on the wound of the government's mishandling of the entire Bersih issue...